New Server

The email server I use was having some hardware issues. Marc picked up a new box and disk, and Jeff, who has somewhat more spare time at the moment than I do, suggested we go with Ubuntu Server 9.04 for the new install.

So we switched from a FreeBSD 6.3 box to Ubuntu Server today, and on it the new mail system was Postfix/MySQL/Courier. We spent a bit over four hours copying files and preparing the user accounts to use the new system before bringing the Ubuntu server online in place of the old FreeBSD one.

The rest of my day has been spent in fixing up other issues, like switching over the couple of WWW domains that were served from there and setting up email list software.

I’ve been using Majordomo for email lists since the 1990s. Unfortunately, that’s about the time of the last update for that software, too. So I am getting acquainted with Mailman instead.

Hopefully, most of those issues will be sorted before the end of the weekend.

On a somewhat more personal note, the way that I’ve done email since the 1990s has been disrupted. I’ve used the .forward file in my user account to pipe incoming email into a Perl script I wrote. It uses a whitelist file and a pattern file to sort incoming mail and append it to a file named for the day and with an extension according to the recognized class of email. Most of my email reading has been done using emacs from the command line of an ssh session. Now I’m dealing with using SquirrelMail as a primary interface, at least until I can work out what to do about the setup. I’m looking into Fetchmail, which I’m hopeful may allow me to do much the same thing as I did before, where my script only stuck back into my incoming mail box those items matching my whitelist criteria.